The End

It is without much sadness that I say I'm gonna throw in the towel on Bear With Me. Cousin Dooders, you made it look so easy, but I don't really have the skill, the insight, or the time to make this blog worthwhile for all three of my followers. Thanks for reading some of the posts, and let me say that I will probably send this blog out with a bang by indulging in the Double Down from Kentucky Fried Chicken.

http://nachodonut.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/kfc-double-down.jpg

Thanks again all, I will now ride off into the sunset along Lake Champlain in Burlington, VT as shown in the picture above.

**Also, for those with a chance to visit New England, be it for business of pleasure, here are some of my favorite spots:

1. Bar Harbor, ME (Hands down the coolest place I've been up there)

2. Portland, ME (Commercial Street)

3. Burlington, VT (Lake Champlain/ Church Street)

4. Portsmouth, RI

5. Providence, RI (Federal Street)

Improvisation

Looking for some dinner tonight during the Penguins/ Red Wings game, I scoured my cupboards and my freezer and found some cheese ravioli. I am a HUGE ravioli fan, so I boiled up some water, threw in a little salt (a trick Weiss Center introduced me to), and went to the fridge to get out my red sauce.

Unfortunately, I had no red sauce in there. I don't cook pasta all that often, and my last jar of pasta sauce magically morphed from "Spicy Red Pepper" flavor to "Mold" flavor. I didn't want to get burned again, so I guess last time I hit the grocery store, I left the pasta sauce off the list.

In a bind, I opted for Newman's Own Italian Dressing. This is probably my favorite Italian dressing, as its very rich, full of herbs, and flavorful. Once the ravioli were done, I poured a nice layer of Newman over the little pillows. I then proceeded to toss on some hot pepper flakes, oregano, and basil, and of course, about a pound and a half of parmesan cheese.

All in all, this improvisation was not that bad. Not as good as a nice rich red sauce or meat sauce, but a bit better than I had even anticipated. The lesson is, as always, with enough parmesan cheese, anything is possible.

Louis' Lunch

Not long ago, I was watching a show on the Travel Channel called the Chowdown Countdown. It listed some of the most iconic restaurants throughout the United States, counted them down from 100-1, and showed the details of what made them great. http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Chowdown_Countdown

Some were famous for their location, some for their longevity, some for their gluttony. A personal favorite of mine, Primanti Brothers, of Pittsburgh fame, for all the reasons listed above, was sure to be on this list. The only question was where would it land? As it turned out, it was # 3 in the country, so I figured numbers 1 and 2 were places that I should try if I ever got the chance.

And get the chance I did, when I found myself in New Haven, CT on Thursday night, just in time for dinner, and just blocks away from Louis' Lunch. This place is right in the middle of what appears to be a "happening" part of town, at least by what I imagine New Haven's standards to be. It's a pretty nice row of bars, and late night food joints, with Louis Lunch I suppose being the most iconic.
http://louislunch.com/

Apparently, as the story goes, this place served America's first hamburger back in the year 1900, and when you walk into the place, it actually feels like 1900. The walls are all brick, with most of the bricks engraved with the year they were sent over to the building. There are wooden panels throughout the place as well, and they are all engraved, too, only they are engraved with the names, initials, and things-to-remember-me-by of generations and generations of patrons. (Looking for a while for a place to make my mark, I threw an "M.D.E. 3/11/10" right above the middle panel on the inside of the bathroom door.)

The place was very cool, very small, and very intimidating. I had been to places like this before (i.e. Pat's Cheesesteaks in Philadelphia, The Pizza House in Ambridge, PA if that's more your thing...), where if you don't know how to order, you don't get much time to learn, you start to panic, and you wind up feeling like a dork sitting back at your table with something you didn't even want to eat. I was wary of this happening to me here, but I had two things working to my advantage: 1. it was not crowded at all. Maybe about 3 cops and a family of 3 sitting down to eat, so they weren't trying to blast through a never-ending line of customers. 2. The people behind the counter were actually really nice. I looked at the menu for a minute, ordered a "Ham Tomato" a bag of chips, and a can of Pepsi. I got a "No problem, sir," and it was up and ready in about 7 minutes.

Now 7 minutes may seem like a long time to cook a burger, but when you see how they cook it, you'd understand if it takes 25. They use the original broilers that they must have used back in 1900, pressing the burger together vertically so some of the fat and grease drips into a tray along the bottom. (Normally I'd be alarmed, as the grease usually brings the flavor to the burger, which is why I never press the burgers with a spatula while on the grill, but these burgers were still EXTREMELY juicy, as evidenced by the oil and blood that soaked the bread they served it on.) While the burger is cooking over/ between open flame(s) (it was hard to see exactly how it works from where I was sitting), they throw two pieces of pre-sliced, garden variety white bread into an old-school, rotisserie-type of toaster. Once the burger is done, they slap it in between the bread, toss on a tomato slice or onion slices, whichever you order, and slide it over to you on a paper plate.

The burger was actually really good. I'm a big ketchup guy, and ketchup is a BIG no-no at Louis' Lunch, so I was worried about the flavor being a little dull. That wasn't so much the case, though. You look at the burger, see that it has very few (if any) of the makings of what usually makes a burger great, and then you take a bite and realize it's much better than it looks. The burgers are not huge, but after eating it, I was pretty full, pretty satisified, and glad I had stopped by. 8 Bearclaws, but due in large part to the history and the atmosphere.

The Shore Road Princess

So I finished up my meetings at around 4pm on Wednesday. Being in New Hampshire, but right along the Massachusetts state line, I got curious, so I called my friend Pat and asked him for the address of The Squire in Chatham, MA.

Now in order to understand why I did this, one must know my penchant for the somehow non-award-winning film Summer Catch. Inexplicably, this is one of my favorite movies of all time. The acting: terrible. The plotlines: Horrendous. The baseball scenes: lackluster at best. The movie as whole: INCREDIBLE. I used to watch this movie every night before I pitched in college. I'm not sure what the big draw was about it (aside from Jessica Biel), but I do know that as soon as friends of mine started watching the movie as well, they all became hooked. By junior year, I had teammates screaming out quotes from the movie to me while I was literally mid-windup. It caught on like wildfire. I then shared with non-baseball players, and happened upon a friend of mine (the aforementioned Pat) who had a house in Cape Cod and was, like me, obsessed with the movie. Pat told me that the scenes in the "Oasis" are derived from a dive bar on Main Street in Chatham called The Squire. So when Pat told me the address, as I mentioned above, even though the GPS spit out a 2-hour commute, I had to make the pilgrimage.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234829/

I drove out to Cape Cod as night began to fall. Cut through Boston and out into rural, and eventually coastal, Massachusetts. I had never been to Cape Cod before, and although it was pretty dark by the time I arrived, the place looks gorgeous. The houses are huge, the feeling is very old-time, rustic New England, and the seafood was fresh, so luckily for me, the kitchen at the Squire was open.
http://www.thesquire.com/

I opted for a cup of clam chowder and an order of the buffalo shrimp, and washed it down with a glass of Naragansett beer. If I were really going for the whole Summer Catch experience, I probably would have had a Sam Adams, but quite honestly, I can't stand that garbage. The clam chowder was great, the buffalo shrimp were more breading than shrimp, and the Naragansett, well, it was reminiscent of Keystone Light, only not as light. I had it a couple times before when in Rhode Island, and really don't remember it being this bad.

So overall, the food gets a meager 5 Bearclaws.

However, I wasn't there for the food. I was there to walk the movie-set reminiscent footsteps of Ryan Dunne, #26, the hometown lefty. I was there to talk Chatham A's baseball with the bartender (which I did.) I was there to see a couple Cape Cod townies (which I did.) I was there to talk about life during the summers at the Cape (which I really did not.) I was there to feel like a huge loser (which I did.) Either way, the bar was very reminiscent of the one in the movie, and I think it's now safe to say I'm maybe the only person who has ever made a "Pilgrimage" to the Squire in Chatham to talk about the movie Summer Catch. That's the kind of stuff you do when you're alone in New England with a company car and 7 hours to kill.

That being said, upon telling a number of my fellow Summer Catch junkies about the pilgrimage, a summer visit has been all but guaranteed, and I'm looking forward to soaking it all in when the weather is warm and the bats are cracking.

Tuesday in Nashua

Tonight I checked into my hotel around 5:30, so I had ample time to research a good place to eat. Despite what the details of my Chicago trip might lead you to believe, I am a big "when in Rome" diner. I try to avoid prominent chains when I'm in new places, and opt instead for local joints with a little bit of personality. However, in this particular situation, I was faced with a former love that was seemingly calling my name and asking me to break habit. I searched "All Food" in my GPS while in the hotel parking lot and saw "Ground Round" as an option.
http://www.groundround.com/

I have been to the Ground Round in Moon Township, PA approximately 415,000 times. I used to go after school with my mom. I used to go on weekends for "Pay what you weigh" day. I think I celebrated more than one birthday with Bingo the Clown and the rest of the Ground Round staff. I also hadn't been in probably six years. The Ground Round is not healthy. The Ground Round is a chain. But the Ground Round is also delicious, and it was nostalgic. So after I got to my room I fired up the computer, and saw there was no info on a Nashua, NH location for the Ground Round. Apparently, it has closed. I longingly looked at the menu online, and then decided to hit up Thousand Crane Chinese/ Japanese Restaurant. It looked affordable. It had good reviews online, and so I decided to take a drive into downtown Nashua to give it a try.
http://thousandcranerestaurant.com/

Downtown Nashua is actually a little cooler than I thought. It has a lot of different shops, bakeries, bars, and restaurants. It reminded me a little of a smaller, watered-down, lower-class Portland, Maine, and Portland is one of my favorite cities that I've visited, no question about it. Thousand Crane was right in the heart of the downtown Nashua area, just off a side street. I walked in solo, and took a seat at the sushi bar. There were oly four other people in the whole place, for a second I thought they were closed. But once seted, I was greeted by a friendly (albeit difficult to understand) sushi chef, a super-tiny glass of water (major pet peeve of mine), and a free order of edamame. The edamame were very good, not too salty, not too wet. I put them away pretty quickly as I watched the sushi chef go to work. The art of sushi rolling is pretty cool, and seeing it first-hand, also seems pretty easy. However, this guy was working with some heavier artillery than you usually see in sushi recipes. I ordered a shrimp tempura roll, and he brought out four full prawns, all the length of a chopstick and the diameter of golf ball. They were huge. They looked more like lobsters than they did shrimp as he laid them on the rice bed to start rolling. Once he rolled them up, while slightly difficult to eat, they were worth the effort, and definitely made to perfection.

I also tossed in an "Alaskan King Roll", which had shrimp tempura, crab meat, tobiko, scallion, spicy mayo, and eel sauce, and a Spicy Salmon Roll. These rolls were not as large as the online reviews or the first roll that he put together led me to believe, but I left the place feeling somewhat full and satisfied with a good meal.

However, I also left with a new appreciation for the people you randomly come across in life and the stories they each have. The sushi chef tonight was a super nice guy. He made me a free appetizer of white tuna tartare, which was really good, and proceeded to inform me of all the good watering holes in Nashua and where to go when in New Hampshire. He also told me that the sushi grade fish that they use is driven up every morning from Boston (about an hour) and only stays fresh/ good for 1-2 days max. The real doozy, though, was that this guy told me that he is the co-owner of the largest sushi restaurant in Southern China. He is a Chinese native who moved to America 6 years ago, lived in Boston for most of that time, and goes back to China for a week at a time once every two months. His brother runs the restaurant while he is in America, but he's contemplating a permanent move back home to run the restaurant at the end of the year. Why any of this is relevant, I'm not sure. And this guy also could have been lying through his teeth about everything, but even if he was, it was an interesting conversation that addedd another dimension to a normally hum-drum, quiet dinner.

I'd give the sushi at Thousand Crane about a 6.5, but with the individual attention and good conversation I had, we'll push them up to 7 Bearclaws. Good times tonight.

On my way out of the area, though, I saw a Brewery/ Restaurant called Martha's Exchange. It looked like a cool place to get a drink, so I stopped in and had a house brew. It was a pretty standard beer, and it was overshadowed by the bakery/ confectionary that adorned the corner of the restaurant near the exit. I stopped and got myself a chocolate-covered s'more there. Now I know I'm a chocoholic. However, this was only magnified and reaffirmed when I bit into the chocolate-covered s'more and there was no Hershey bar inside. Why they would cover chocolate in chocolate is beyond me, and the marshmallow and graham cracker by themselves were good, but I was still overcome with a slight sense of disappointment that a golden opportunity to really knock the chocolate levels out of the park went by the wayside. All in all, if you're ever in Nashua, although this place was kind of dead on a Tuesday night, with it's plentiful beers on tap, big menu, and apparently good happy hour deals, I still think Martha's Exchange could be a good place to go to kill some time and put a few back.

New Hampshire, New Restaurants

I'm back on the road for work this week. After a 7-hour drive on Monday afternoon, I got up to Concord, NH on Monday night. I decided to stop at some casual dining restaurant called Cactus Jack's. If you know me, you know I am a huge fan of casual dining. That being said, I'm not sure how to describe this place. It's either a rich man's Chili's, a poor man's Red Lobster, or a homeless man's Cheesecake Factory. Or all of the above.
http://www.go2cjs.com/

Either way, it was pretty good. I ponied up to the bar, wearing my Penguins hat, which apparently was a bad move, as the Pens had just taken out the Boston Bruins' best player, possibly for the season, the night before. This was not a good way to make friends, but I managed to make the most important one in the house: the bartender. He supplied me with a menu, which was encased in leather. It also was one of the most diverse menu's I've ever encountered. I would say it was a Tex-Mex-Cajun-Creole-American-Seafood-BBQ joint, and I ordered accordingly, going with the Rajun Cajun Catfish Tacos, after much deliberation. About 90% of the items on this 12-page menu appealed to my favorite tastes and food genres.

So these tacos consisted of fresh Cajun-seared catfish inside two crab-dip-wrapped hard shell tacos. They were filled with lettuce, pico de gallo, poblano peppers, and melted colby and jack cheeses. These cheeses were actually a really good addition because they were plentiful and super melty, so they really kept the tacos from crumbling and spilling all over the place. And as a whole, I would have to simply say these tacos were awesome. They came two to an order, had a lot of flavor, and once they got to me, they did not stand a chance. Only thing that was missing was a little extra heat, so I asked for hot sauce. I was offered Tabasco (a personal dietary staple) or their signature "Habanero Death" sauce. Being a sensible human being, I opted for the Habanero Death. It was aptly named. This was certainly not the hottest sauce I've ever tasted, but it put a kick into these tacos that could qualify them for the World Cup this summer. I have to hand it to Cactus Jack, though. For a sauce that hot, the Habanero Death also had plenty of flavor. As long as it was applied sparingly, it took these tacos to a whole new level, and boosted a slightly better than run-of-the-mill casual dining joint to a 7 Bearclaw Dinner. Add in the fact that the tacos were flanked by the interesting side dish choices of sweet potato fries (crispy and excellent) and cactus slaw (basically just cole slaw), and I'll bump this particular selection at Cactus Jack's to a 7.5.

**I found out on my way out that Cactus Jack's is a chain exclusive to New Hampshire, so if you're ever up there, it's worth stopping in if you're looking for something quick and fairly cheap.

Back at It

A great deal of time has elapsed since my last post. Haven't had a ton of free time. Or maybe I have, but regardless, weather and scheduling has put a relative halt to my travels, until last week, when I spent six days in Chicago.

I had never been to Chicago before, and I had heard it was an awesome city with a lot of great sights, alot of great restaurants, and plenty to do. The plenty to do appraisal proved true from the get-go, as I spent Friday night in the Lincoln Park/ Wrigleyville area of the city, and my friend Trout and I painted the town red. Unfortunately, because of this fact, my first meal in exquisite Chicago was at a Taco Bell across the street from Wrigley Field at 2:30 am. Normally, I wouldn't lend more than a sentence to TBell (although it has more mentions on this blog than any other restaurant), but I will mention that Trout ordered the "Charles Barkley." This, of course is the NBA Box, the ad for which Sir Charles starred during the Super Bowl, and Trout gave it a pretty good bearclaw score if I do say so.

Next day, in an effort to start taking advantage of the city a bit more, we went out to lunch. At Buffalo Wild Wings. Another chain... There was some good college basketball on half the TVs, and trivia on the others, so lunch ran until about 4 pm. I personally am a huge fan of BW's, it has some of the best chicken wings, boneless chicken wings, sides, and sauces in the game. I know most of the people in Philly and DC who may be reading this may not have been, because they don't seem to be that big around here. Back in the Burgh, though, it was a staple of high school life, and the Chicago location was nothing short of equally delicious. Service was a bit slow, and beer specials weren't that special at all, but I'm still glad we went.
http://www.buffalowildwings.com/

Sunday wound up being the highlight of the weekend, as we followed up a relatively slow Saturday (the highlight of which was watching the 2009 Penguins Stanley Cup DVD and fighting back tears) with quite an eventful Sunday. We started out at a few bars, took some pictures at Wrigley Field and then decided, on a whim, to head to the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond, Indiana.
http://www.horseshoe-indiana.com/
To be quite frank, this place was more depressing than the first 1:45 of The Pursuit of Happyness, but even on a Sunday at 1 pm, it was PACKED. I guess atmopshere and look doesn't matter when the money they pay out is as real as the money they use in the Venetian, and bewteen the two of us, Trout and I left the place with about $1,000 of that money. (Of course he accounted for about 70%, but it sounded better that way.)

We left the Horseshoe with high spirits and big appetites. Luckily for us, it was restaurant week in Chicago as well. I lucked out hitting Buddakan during Philly Restaurant week, and we decided to take a different route for Chicago's. Trout's friends got reservations at a Brazilian Steakhouse called Texas de Brazil.
http://www.texasdebrazil.com/
I had been to one of these types of restaurants before, and I left feeling physically ill from the amount of food that I ate. This time around, it was no different. The premise at these places is simple: they stock the salad bar with the most gourmet salad items, soups, and sides that you can imagine: grilled provolone squares, shrimp salad, tuna tartare, hearts of palm, and more. Also, I must add that my aforementioned parmesan cheese addiction was fed by a half-sphere of solid parmesan, with an indentation chiseled into the middle, forming a bowl of parmesan chunks. I could have grabbed a spoon and eaten that all night, but I knew there was meat to be had, so I returned to my seat, flipped my coaster to "green", and it was on. They had flank steak, filet mignon, filet wrapped in bacon, chicken wrapped in bacon, top sirloin, and among many, many more, their signature meat, Picanha. All of them were cooked perfectly, seasoned perfectly, and came to the table in droves.

I won't say how much meat we all ate, because I think I blacked out after the first hour or 2,500 calories. Whichever came first. But I will say that places like Texas de Brazil and Fogo de Chao (and I'm sure any other three-word Brazilian steakhouses with the word "de" sandwiched in between) blow my mind as to how they can cook so much steak, and cook it so well. This meal was definitely a once-every-year-or-few type of excursion, and the price of $32 per head was a once-every-year-or-few type of deal (although I guess restaurant week is an annual thing). Despite missing out on the famous "Wiener's Circle" and their "Chocolate Milkshakes" right down the street from Trout's apartment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wieners_Circle), I think we made a great dinner choice, getting not only a meal, but an experience, and four days worth of food. 8 Bearclaws.